We are a collective of health justice organizers. Our primary goal is to enable organizers to win people-powered campaigns to advance health justice and its intersections around climate, race, geography, class, caste, gender and sexuality. 

Our work is to organize training, develop leadership, coaching, mentoring, building relational power and learning with our constituency through their campaigns. 

Two integral pillars of our work are coaching and learning. We are connected to each other and our people through the coaching where we do not offer answers to a challenge, but ask important questions to find the answers together. We create intentional spaces to deep dive into learnings from our real on ground actions and on the basis of our shared learnings, we implement our next actions.

Our story

In 2021, Four of us- Steph, Sreejani, Jon and Pedja came together as speakers for two panel discussions organized by the Leading Change Network (LCN). We were all health justice organizers deeply engaging with our people to win public health campaigns.  The panel discussion created a space for us to meet each other, to talk about the experiences and challenges as young leaders organizing for health justice, and shared our experiences fighting for change for public and global health. It was a meaningful discussion to all of us, but as much as we believe in the power of storytelling, all of us explicitly shared the notion of converting dialogues into real time action. We were all dealing with campaign losses and failures from times  when most of us couldn’t convince our organizations to give us the resources or even the time to train our members. We continued meeting to discuss how we could support each other, and soon realized that we could work together to coach and mentor the constituents of our own organizations and projects. 

Pedja left our core team, but he continues to be an advisor and friend. Brian Archie and Flannery Hauck joined the core team in 2022.

In February 2024 we held a retreat to plan the next phase of OH-J. We decided to be specific about who our people are - health justice or public health organizers who have already gone through some sort of workshop or mentorship program in the Leading Change Network pedagogy, and are looking for more support to continue their work. From here we designed our current cohort model, and found others to help shape and participate in this program.

We strongly believe that leadership is a shared responsibility and that the community is at the heart of change and taking action to make a difference. We have a core leadership team of 5 people from diverse identities, locations and backgrounds. We are organizing organizers: our objective is to coach and mentor 10 leaders to win, grow and get better at their campaigns.

Brian Archie